Justice Scalia’s Fading Legacy
By Linda GreenhouseNYT, March 15, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/opinion/justice-antonin-scalia-legacy.html?comments#permid=26336550:26336572
It is so sad, that a man who lived and ruled mostly by bluster, and who’s legacy is supposedly fading, still has a profound and disastrous influence on everyday life in the US through the one ruling, which is the basis for is fame, or infamy, depending on your stance.
I have never been able to understand how people of high intelligence and supposedly exceptional education can purport to be able to Devine the original intent of the disparate group of people who wrote the US Constitution. It always strikes me as somewhat like sneaking into the dimply lit cubicle of a “spiritualist”, who, for a fee, will make you believe to be communication with the spirits of lost loved ones. If divining the “original intent” were really the purpose, we could just appoint a bunch of spiritualists and tarot card readers to the Supreme Court.
The Constitution was written 250+ years ago. The world has changed dramatically since them. To be relevant, the “interpretation” of the Constitution must be relevant to today’s world, not the mid 1700’s. A case in point is the Second Amendment. In his infamous ruling, Scalia first twist himself up like a pretzel in one direction to argue that the introductory clause on a “well regulated militia” does not apply. Then he comes up with weirdly convoluted arguments to argue that “arms” in the text of the Second Amendment does NOT apply to all the arsenal of the military, because even Scalia recognized that the type of weaponry individual citizens should be allowed to have, needs to be restricted, lest the monopoly of legitimate use of force by government, which is one of the defining characteristics of “a state”, is completely abandoned and we decide to go back to a Wild West type chaos.
It may be fading, but Scalia’s legacy is still causing the US to be an outlier among civilized countries by the daily carnage which takes place in our schools, shopping malls, movie theaters and the streets of cities like Chicago and Baltimore.
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